Critical Essay by Adelaida López Mejía

In the following essay, Mejía examines the relationship between the dictator and populace as portrayed in The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Of course, there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead.

—Jacques Lacan1

I

The figure of the unburied corpse, which Gabriel García Márquez evokes with an epigraph from Antigone in his first novel La hojarasca, returns in El otoño del patriarca (OP) with the force of an obsession.2 In the later novel, at...